Midlands stars with an appetite for destruction...

Region tops list for the bad boys of rock

But the Midlands boasts the world’s highest proportion of crazed, drug-addled rockers.

Icons
from the region take up nearly a quarter of a new book, Cemetery Gates,
which catalogues the drug overdoses, murder, arson, addiction, sexual depravity and in many cases the sheer will to survive displayed by hedonistic global heavy metal and hard rock legends.

In
the section of Mick O’Shea’s 256-page book marked ‘Saints’, reading as an extended obituary, comes Led Zeppelin’s fearsome drummer John Bonham,
from Redditch, who powered the group through 12 years of superstardom.

Bonham,
acclaimed as the best sticksman on the planet, paid the price for his fast-paced, wild lifestyle, dying in September 1980 aged just 32.

They all somehow cheated death to enjoy lavishly successful careers, selling millions upon millions of albums.

O’Shea’s
luridly entertaining tome charts the sorry decline of prodigiously gifted Bonham, known as Bonzo, who experienced ‘primarily booze-induced tailspins into deep depression’ near the start of Led Zep’s astonishing series of worldwide, stadium-filling tours.

This
soon gave way to rampant Class A drug use, the drummer allegedly secreting an ounce or more of cocaine between his knees during gigs so he could partake as he played.

Bonham,
whose capacity for violence was epitomised by his declaration “If it moves, I hit it; if it doesn’t move, I still hit it”, once punched Michelle Myer, associate of producer Kim Fowley, full in the face, knocking her off her restaurant seat, bellowing: “Don’t ever look at me that way again!”

Bonzo, who was married, and Zep road manager Richard Cole, were notorious users of groupies.

The drummer, who descended into heroin use, died from inhaling his own vomit after downing around 40 shots of vodka.

None
of the Midland rock stars can quite match the sheer brutality of Norwegian black-metal figurehead Varg Vikernes’ senseless slaying of his
bandmate Oystein Aarseth, but – to just like the debut Guns N’ Roses album – they certainly demonstrated a frightening appetite for (self) destruction.

Born
Saul Hudson, O’Shea tells how he was hauled off to live in Laurel Canyon in LA by his hippie mum when he was 12, and was introduced to freebasing cocaine when he was in his teens, by his mother’s photographer boyfriend.

The gifted musician started smoking heroin in 1984, and later injecting, after observing ‘how cool’ future bandmate Izzy Stradlin looked while using it.

He developed a serious addiction, but, having seen roadie Todd Crew die in his arms after taking an overdose of the drug, Slash switched temporarily to booze – vast quantities, naturally.

He
soon fell back into heroin use, prompting fed-up frontman Axl Rose to get him to confess to being a junkie – in front of 83,000 fans at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1989.

Slash
received a further major wake-up call in 2001, when he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and given no more than six weeks to live.

He
eventually straightened himself out after his second wife Perla discovered she was pregnant, and has been clean and sober since 2006.

Growling
Motorhead frontman and bassist Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister, from Burslem, who has led the awesome power trio for 37 years, has unrepentantly continued
knocking back a bottle of Jack Daniels every day – although just last week the band has had to issue a statement that he is ‘alive and kicking’ after he was taken ill on stage.

By
the mid 70s Lemmy developed a taste for amphetamine sulphate – better known as speed – which he said helped him fulfil his day-to-day commitments: “At least [it] keeps you functional. Why else did they give
it to housewives for all those years? ...It’s the only drug I’ve found that I can get on with, and I’ve tried them all – except smack [heroin] and morphine: I’ve never fixed anything.”

Lemmy’s
doctor stopped him from copying Rolling Stone Keith Richards’ example of having his toxin-riddled blood changed, so avoiding the normal detoxification process. Having pure blood would kill him, he was told.

“In other words,” said Lemmy, who has slept with 2,000 women, “what’s normal for me is deadly to another human.”

It
was love at first snort for Sabbath vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, clean for years until a surprise drink and drugs relapse earlier this year.

He sampled cocaine in 1971.

Within
12 months he said he was ‘putting so much of it up my nose that I had to smoke a bag of dope every day just to stop my heart from exploding’.

Although
his Brummie bandmates also had a penchant for the powder, Ozzy was eventually sacked by his colleagues in 1979, prompting a near-suicidal 12-week binge.

Going solo, Ozzy, from Aston, kept his habit, and once, when no cocaine was available, snorted a line of ants.

Described
by O’Shea as ‘the one true Demigod of Metal Debauchery’, Ozzy, while considerably refreshed, once bit the head off a bat thrown onstage by a fan in 1982 (the year he and Sharon got married), believing it to be a toy.

He later said: “I got rabies shots for biting the head off a bat, but that’s OK – the bat had to get Ozzy shots.”

It
was always an unusual marriage, Sharon looking on helplessly as Ozzy washed his daily drug intake down with up to four bottles of cognac.

The
pair fought regularly, Ozzy once facing an attempted murder charge in 1989 after trying to strangle Sharon. Eventually the couple resolved their differences, although their melodramatic lives became an obvious subject matter for hugely successful TV reality show The Osbournes.

The 64-year-old is aware how near he has been to joining Bonham as a, er, ‘saint’.

“I know exactly how close I’ve come,” he said.

“The edge is always closer than you think – especially when you don’t mean to jump.”

* Cemetery Gates – Saints and Survivors of the Heavy Metal Scene by Mick O’Shea is available now for £14.99 through Plexus Publishing Ltd.